


we are the kids that you never can kill

by raekentheory



Series: the house that built me [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Sibling Bonding, cameos and other universer tweaks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-21
Updated: 2018-11-21
Packaged: 2019-08-27 06:12:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16696975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raekentheory/pseuds/raekentheory
Summary: When three strange figures in masks come to them, in the dark of night, offering a light—a way to wake from the awful nightmare that plagues their lives—Tara is the only one who understands his temptation. His desire to be something… more. Something better. They want to protect one another, and they're going to walk this path together, no matter the cost.Or, in a universe where things happen a little differently, both Raeken siblings are taken by the Dread Doctors, an act that ripples across the timeline we know.





	we are the kids that you never can kill

**Author's Note:**

> written, late as always, for day two of Theo Week 2018. I'm counting it for days one and three as well, because it features a bucket of angst and growing up.
> 
> title from _We Are the Kids_ , by Walk the Moon.

Theo has always felt connected to this sister.   

Twins, born three years apart, their mother always joked, the days she’d actually paid them any mind. Thick as thieves, inseparable, one soul split between two bodies. Two halves of a whole, he’s shared with her things he hasn’t shared with anyone else in the world.

His biggest dreams.

His worst failures.

His crush on Scott.

His occasional but intense dislike of Stiles.

Their father’s drunken rage.

She’s the only one who knows what it’s like. The only one who’s felt the same pain, who’s cried the same tears under the safety of their blankets in the middle a bleak, sleepless night. The only one who knows how young bones can break, how easily tender flesh can bruise.

When three strange figures in masks come to them, in the dark of night, offering a light—a way to wake from the awful nightmare that plagues their lives—Tara is the only one who understands his temptation. His desire to be something… more. Something better.

Theo just wants to protect her, and as always, their desires and needs mirrored, Tara wants to keep him safe. They both want to keep the dangers of the world and their home away from their sibling.

And so, that night, in the cover of darkness, they go with the three masked figures. The Raeken siblings follow them out of the house and into the sewers. Down the long, winding tunnels and into the awaiting shadows.

They clamber onto twin metal beds, the cold biting at their young bones and the straps digging into their tender flesh. They hold hands across the chasm between them, and their eyes stay locked together as the Doctors play at being gods.

As they take the Raeken siblings apart, piece by piece, and put them back together again in a different order. Just slightly so, with a few added pieces that weren’t there before.

Wolf fur and coyote blood and his sister’s heart, sitting squarely in his chest.

He watches as the Doctors pluck fur from the coyote, then draw blood from the wolf with a thick syringe. He watches as they lower both these things into the abyss in his sister’s chest alongside his beating heart, and sew everything up tightly beneath her skin.

After that, their connection changes. It feels more like a real, palpable thing. Like an invisible string tying them together, never allowing them to stray too far from each other, resulting in a gravitational pull of moons orbiting the same planet. It’s something that thrums beneath his skin, something he can always feel, every minute of every day, keeping him aware of where Tara is in relation to him.

He wonders, sometimes, if this is what real shifters feel. If this what the call of a pack feels like. An otherworldly connection to another person just like you.

But quite quickly, Theo realizes it’s different with them. That it’s something wholly and uniquely theirs.

He feels it for the first time when they’re fresh out of recovery for their respective surgeries. The night of their _awakening_ , the Doctors call it.

They’ve only been missing in Beacon Hills for a few days, so it’s easy to slip unnoticed through suburbia and across their neighbourhood. Easy to draw their mourning father from his cloud of rot and booze and out into the night after them.

He’s furious and screaming himself raw as he stalks them into woods, a mad dog after his disgraceful flock of sheep, but Theo and his sister aren’t afraid of him anymore.

They’re wolves wearing wool over their heads, dragons waiting in their cracked shells to burst free and burn the world to ashes before they leave it behind. They’re monsters with sharp teeth and claws, wearing human faces to lure their prey further into the woods.

All the way to a little bridge, above a small, winding river just deep enough to wade in.

They know the place well. They’ve come here dozens of times with their parents in the summer for a picnic. For a few hours of peace and quiet, where they pretend they’re a perfectly normal, happy family.

Well, Theo’s done pretending.

He’s done with excuses and hoping with a little boy’s heart that things will change. His new one’s had three years longer to learn and it knows better.

His skin peels away like an orange, and he lowers himself into a crouch as the shift takes hold of him. As his father’s eyes widen and his mouth drops open. As he looks across the bridge to Tara, and sees the same thing happening. Sees the green of her eyes looking over at him from the snout of a scrawny, russet-coloured coyote.

His own muzzle looks black, and is wider, thicker. Like that of the wolf he’d seen lying on the floor of the Doctors' Operating Theatre. It’s not hard to imagine what the rest of him looks like.

Their father, on the other hand, looks horrified, eyes wide with the kind of fear he’s made them feel so many times over their lives that they’ve lost count. So often, in fact, that seeing it just this once on his face almost doesn’t feel like it’s enough of a trade.

Tara’s the first to growl, the moment their father takes a step towards Theo. It freezes him in place, and they can both smell his fear: an instant, acidic thing. Theo moves, then, his sharp nails clicking against the wood beneath his paws. The whites of their father’s eyes mounts, his terror growing, and Theo bares his teeth.

They don’t have to do much after that, really. Barely even touch him.

They growl and snarl and nip at the air around his legs, never quite finding purchase in his clothes or his skin. They force him back, towards the railing, little by little until he missteps. His heel goes down in between two wood boards at just the wrong angle, and he stumbles back with enough force that there’s a nasty crack. A loud of groan of wood, and then his feet lift off ever so slightly from the ground.

Theo and Tara don’t hesitate.

They surge forward, balancing on their hind legs and putting all the force they can muster into one good, solid shove. Their front paws thump against their father’s chest, and he tips backwards, over the edge. Theo wonders if for him, time slows to a crawl. If he sees it coming, or if his life flashes before his eyes as his feet go up over his head.

For them, it’s quick and painless.

Theo doesn’t feel sad as he watches his father plummet into the water below, as he hears the crack as he hits the rocks beneath the bridge, and the bubbling that follows. He doesn’t feel remorse, or grief—instead, there’s a sense of calm that washes over him, a weight that lifts from his chest after years of pressing against his lungs.

It’s almost overwhelming, how relieved he feels. His heart—his sister’s heart—almost feels like it’ll burst. And that’s when Theo realizes.

As he looks to his side and he sees the bright, glimmering happiness in his sister’s eyes, he _feels_ it. Across the string that connects them, her joy and her relief flood into his mind and crash against the wave of calm already settling in.

 _We’re free,_ he hears, and it’s her voice but it’s only in his head. Unspoken, but _thought._

 _We did it_ , he fires back. Or hopes he does, anyway. He doesn’t know how this works, doesn’t even know if he’s just imagining things, maybe. If the adrenaline pumping in his veins has him making it up entirely.

But then, the fur around her eyes crinkles, and he can almost _swear_ the side of her mouth quirks up slightly. A smiling coyote would surely be an unsettling sight to some, but to Theo, it’s the best thing he’s ever seen. It means that they’re stronger, they’re better and most of all—they’re together.

He notices it more after that. Every time her emotions are heightened, he gets a little flicker of them, a wave of them in a small corner of his mind—of his soul—that’s reserved for her now. That always was, maybe, but was simply waiting for supernatural jumper cables to kick-start it.

And always, with the Raeken siblings, it’s a mirrored thing. He knows it the moment she comes to him, a few days after they’ve left Beacon Hills with the Doctors, and doesn’t say a word about why he’s sitting in the dark, crying. She just sits beside him, wraps her arms tight around his shoulders, and cries with him.

Cries for the friends they left behind, for the childhood they abandoned and can likely never go back and collect. Cries for the people they used to be, and the monsters they’ve become. Together.

It’s another few weeks before Theo realizes the connection extends further than empathy.

They’re just outside of Seattle, testing out their new abilities. They’ve been put through a gauntlet of tests since leaving home, all with the purpose figuring out what exactly they can do. How closely they mimic real shifters, and what differs. Wolfsbane doesn’t affect them as strongly, but electricity does. Silver burns and stings just as much as any other alloy a bullet could be crafted from, and they heal slower, too.

But most of it has been indoors, deep beneath the cities they’ve stayed in. In the dark, dank sewers they now call home. In a lab, with needles and charts and machines and sometimes a pain so fierce they black out.

All in the name of science, or whatever.

This is the first time they’ve been let off the leash since Beacon Hills and their father. Though he doesn’t exactly count, considering he hadn’t been much of a threat. Not anymore, and never again.  

They’ve been sent after a stray. An omega, the Surgeon calls it. A weak, lonely wolf without a pack. Pathetic, and not worth anything to the cause they have become a part of, but still a good experiment. An excellent way to assess just how strong he and his sister are now. How successful.

They find him on the outskirts of the city, barely an hour after their hunt begins. He’s hiding in an abandoned warehouse, squatting like a hopeless, filthy animal. He doesn’t hear them coming until they’re almost upon him, golden eyes blazing and fangs dripping with excitement. He’s much bigger than them, bigger than either expect for a wolf living off scraps, but they’re faster. They’re young and quick, light on their feet.

And together, they’re stronger. Vicious and cunning, they dance around the omega, never quite touching down for longer than a moment, swiping at him with razor-sharp claws over and over again. They whittle him down, exhausting him, until he hasn’t any fight left in him.

Or so they think, anyway.

He still outsmarts them, just a little.

When Tara goes in for the kill, he swings out with one last blow, hitting her hard in the chest. She goes flying, such a light little thing, and slams into the cement wall so hard it cracks and fissures behind her. Theo can hear the snap of her bones from here, and a split second later, there’s a sharp, flaring pain screaming through his right shoulder.

He cries out, goes down on one knee, reaching to shove the omega’s hand from his body. His hand passes through thin air, and he realizes the werewolf isn’t there. He’s still crouched in the middle of the warehouse, three feet ahead of Theo, wheezing and panting and bleeding. He hasn’t touched the young boy, hasn’t even looked at him, and yet Theo’s shoulder is throbbing.

The ache is fading fast, healing itself out of his system, and that’s when he knows it wasn’t his pain to begin with.

As Tara rises, shaking dust from her hair and spitting blood onto the concrete, she reaches up to rub her shoulder. Theo hears the loud _crack_ as she sets it back into place, and watches in awe as she roars, eyes like tiny suns. The omega watches, too, slack-jawed and rooted in place.

It presents Theo with the perfect opportunity to leap forward and tear out his throat.

Afterwards, as the dust settles and blood pools beneath the ruined wolf, Theo asks his sister about it. Wonders aloud if he really can feel her thoughts, and feelings, and pain.

Tara smiles so softly, patient with him as always, and admits that she’s known from their first night with the Doctors. From the moment a needle touched his skin and her left arm itched in the same place, and she felt her brother’s discomfort thrumming in her very blood—she knows they’ve been connected.

And she knows what a danger that is to them both. A harsh truth they discover, days later, when the Doctors are running their final tests on them. The ones that decide whether or not they’ve been a worthwhile experiment.

They’ve always undergone the same experiments, at the same time, on those two cold, metal beds they were first made on. But this time, for whatever reason, Theo’s reflexes are tested while they’re doing blood work on Tara.

The moment the tiny metal hammer slams against his knee, his sister’s leg kicks out, hitting the Geneticist squarely between her legs. The woman shrieks angrily, fumbling the needle and stabbing it into the wrong part of Tara’s arm, away from a vein.

Theo’s right tricep lights up, pain flaring in a singular stinging spot, and he cries out, reaching for it.

And then, slowly, the three Doctors look at one another. There’s clicking and high-pitched hissing and the groaning of metal—the way they speak when they don’t want Theo and Tara to understand them, using frequencies the two children aren’t accustomed to.

He exchanges a look with his sister, eyes wide with fear. Her hand reaches across the chasm between them, and he takes it, crushing her fingers between his. And they wait, trembling like newborn babes, to be told their future.

To be told that something is wrong with them, that they’re a failed experiment. That this wasn’t part of the plan and therefore isn’t wanted. That they’re a powder keg waiting to blow, and simply aren’t the risk.

They’ve seen it happen once, to the kid who’d already been waiting in the sewers beneath Beacon Hills, all those weeks ago. Who’d already been opened up and taken apart, just like Theo and Tara, and had pieces put in that weren’t there before. Who the Doctors had already helped make stronger, and better—at least, for a little while.

And then, as his condition had worsened, silver liquid oozing from his pores and black blood spilling from his lips—they’d put him out of his misery. They’d written him off as a failure and disposed of him, like spoiled meat.

They expect this, but the words never come.

Instead, the Raeken siblings are branded as… interesting. As having potential. As worth the effort and time spent on them, despite the fact that they haven’t exactly produced the results the Doctors are looking for, whatever that is.

So they’re kept around, not unlike pets.

They’re allowed their own room, and the barest of material possessions. Books, mostly. To study and learn and educate themselves in their spare time. Sometimes they’re even allowed souvenirs from the cities that they visit, as they’re paraded across the country on a road trip of sorts.

One that leaves a wake of missing children and failed experiments in its wake.

They’re given smalls tasks, missions that let them feel included, a part of the team. And they’re given training. Always more training, and always more tests.

As they grow and learn, they become more involved. They’re allowed to do more things than simple fetch quests for food and water, basic supplies. They’re taught to lie, and steal, and spin the right kind of web to lure in a new subject.

They learn to use their bond to be more efficient, too. How to rip apart prey without speaking a word of strategy to one another, or con a man out of all his money at a poker table as long as one of them befriends him first. There isn’t anything they can’t take on, together.

 _Just us against the world,_  they tell each other, sometimes with words and sometimes just by feeling it.

Because he feels everything Tara does.

Her awe when they see their first snow in Colorado.

Her delight when she pushes him out of a tree in Illinois and he catches himself on the last branch.

Her nervousness the first time she feels for someone else, a pretty girl at their school in West Chester, Pennsylvania; and her subsequent embarrassment as the Doctors tell them that relationships are a distraction. A detriment to the mission they still haven’t been told.

Her doubt as less and less of the subjects come from broken homes, but happy, fruitful lives.

Her fury when the Doctors pick a little girl who can’t be older than six, who has good, loving parents and a kind older brother. Her anguish when the girl’s condition becomes terminal, and the growing bitterness in her soul widens.

Her sadness when Theo discovers the book of names she keeps beneath her mattress, of all the subjects that have failed the experiment. Of all the lives lost that didn’t deserve it, and her resentment that they lost theirs, too, in a way.

Her desire for their freedom, their safety, and a home. A pack. A family they can call their own.

Her fear as she tells her brother that she wants to leave. Run away and never come back.

Her shock when they’re told of Scott McCall and Derek Hale and the two biggest packs in Beacon Hills, and the dread when the Doctors announce their plans to return to the only town where they’ve ever had any success—even if it wasn’t in the way they had expected.

Her anticipation when they head out just days later for their hometown for the first time in almost ten years.

Tara reeks of nerves the night before they leave, as she tells Theo her plan to defeat the Doctors. To use the friends they both left behind and their respective packs to overthrow the three walking nightmares and save not only themselves, but so many more kids. To ask for forgiveness for their years of atrocities and hopefully, find a new home there.

Though he has his doubts, Theo agrees.

It’s just their luck that the next day, standing in the very same operating theatre they were made in, in front of two folders filled with names and photos and information, the Raeken siblings are told to infiltrate different packs. That they’re told, for the first time in ten years, to do something _separately._

Theo is given the Dunbar-McCall pack, told to reconnect with his old friends and make new ones. To draw them away from the Doctors and keep them off the scent. He flips through the folder, through the assortment of werewolves and banshees and kitsunes and he wonders.

He wonders what it’ll be like to see Scott and Stiles again. Wonders if they missed him, if they worried for him, if they even noticed he’d left. He wonders what stories Beacon Hills spun of him and his sister and their father’s death. He wonders if his old friends know what luck they had to live safe and happy in their hometown, instead of poked and prodded in every sewer system across the country. He wonders how difficult it will be to contend with not only a True Alpha, but a born one too. The matriarch of the Dunbar pack.

He wonders, coldly, what it would be like to pull them apart, piece by piece, and put them back together again, just slightly different. With something that wasn’t there before. He’s sure Stiles knows what it’s like to be unmade, but the others?

Tara, meanwhile, is assigned to the Hale pack. Her folder covers three Hales (two of which are Alphas), one half, and a group of misfit kids her childhood friend Derek has given supernatural abilities to. As she looks them over carefully, he feels her worry through their bond. Worry that she won’t be able to infiltrate a pack of wolves that only has one other coyote. Worry that she won’t be able to lie to them, the way she can to strangers.

And worry that they’re doing the wrong thing.

They’re given a small house on their old street, a car each, and enough funds to make them appear like a perfectly normal teenager and his older, community college-going sister. They don’t ask where it all came from, who disappeared to give them the perfect cover story: returning to their hometown for Theo’s final year of high school, happy and healed after years away from the horrors of their youth.

Dragging new horrors in the dark cloud that follows them and settles over Beacon Hills.

Things change, after that. They feel different.

At first, Theo thinks it’s just because they’re not working in tandem on this one. That by separating them, the Doctors have thrown him and his sister off their game.

But it becomes apparent that’s not all it is.

It’s slow at first, a flicker of doubt from her mind to his. The smallest slip in efficiency, and an unwillingness to see her old friends torn apart, and her plea that Theo stop messing with his, too. Her growing friendship and interest in one of the subjects of this experiment, one of the newly dubbed _chimeras._ Her horror and sadness as Tracy fails, just like Josh and Hayden and Lucas before her, and Tara can’t stop the mercury bubbling up through the girl’s lips.

He’s always kept the subjects and people they’ve met at a distance. Always known that getting attached would be their downfall. It’s why he’d wanted to single out Scott, separate him from his pack and take him out of the equation entirely—no sense risking the future of his plans on an old crush. It’s why he’s done his best to ignore a pair of pretty blue eyes on a very angry beta. The younger of the two Dunbar wolves.

It’s just his luck that while he’d been trying his best to keep his focus, he hadn’t been paying attention to his sister. Hadn’t been reading her emotions through their bond.

He doesn’t feel her profound, naked belief across the string that ties them together that they can have a life here, until she’s standing in front of him, begging him to reconsider. If only they worked _with_ the packs instead of against them. Derek and Talia Hale have already offered her a place in theirs, and she knows if he tried a little harder to convince Scott and the others, he might do the same.

The issue, of course, is that Theo doesn’t want that.

He lived eight years under their father’s thumb, and ten more under the Doctors’. He’s done answering to other people, and taking orders. _He_ wants to be the one in charge of his own life, his own pack, no matter what.

So it doesn’t matter that he can’t have the Dunbar-McCall one. It doesn’t matter that he couldn’t sway Scott’s beta to his side and convince Mason to kill his Alpha so Theo, in turn, could steal it the spark.

He’s always been resourceful. The Doctors have always told him it’s one of his best qualities, thinking on his feet, having more than one plan sitting in your back pocket. So what if Theo can’t steal another pack and claim it as his own?

He’ll just make one, instead.

He picks Josh for his powers. Electricity is, after all, a fantastic deterrent to shifters. He also picks him for his weak will, knowing the boy will take someone else’s lead, if he offers more power and control in exchange.

He picks Corey for much of the same reasons, utility and an easily procurable loyalty. He knows the boy comes from a neglectful home, so with the right amount of praise, he’s sure it’ll be easy to sway his favour. And he’s been an excellent bargaining chip against Mason, Scott’s beta, once already.

He picks Lucas for his ties to Corey, knowing he can keep the scorpion in line, and hoping that if he settles the boy’s temper, he’ll be the perfect distraction for the chameleon, to keep the boy from getting second thoughts.

And finally, he picks Tracy. As a gift, a peace offering or an olive branch, of sorts. Her Kanima half is useful, certainly, but Theo knows he’s made the right choice when Tara sees her again, alive and well, and her eyes well up with tears, her heart with relief and gratitude.

He’s sure the girl will bring his sister back to his side. That Tara will rejoin him, stand beside him at the head of the chimera pack, Alphas in their own right. They’ll be stronger than the Steiner twins were when they’d been Alphas, instead of the weak betas they are under the Hale roof now. They’ll be better.

He doesn’t realize that his blind faith in his sister, the only person in this world he’s ever truly trusted and cared about, is his undoing. That bringing Tracy back to life was his one mistake.

He doesn’t realize it, even as his pack starts to fall apart. Even as his grip on things starts to slip, and his plans crumble to pieces. As he stumbles through the sewers, Josh and Lucas’ powers thrumming beneath his skin.

He should feel Tracy’s, too. After all, she’d confronted him in the Operating Theatre over the deaths of her fellow chimeras, voiced her doubts about his leadership and sanity, and admitted that Tara was right to leave them and join the other side. She’d tried to kill him, and he was sure he’d dealt her a fatal blow in return… but he can’t feel it.

All Theo feels is rage and frustration and failure—and guilt.

The last one he doesn’t understand. Doesn’t know why he’d feel that, when he doesn’t regret anything he’s done to get him to this point.

And then, as he turns the corner in the sewers and comes face to face with his sister, he finally understands.

He feels her heartbreak. Her anguish. _Her_ guilt, washing over him.

He feels Tara’s regret, thick in the air, as she steps towards him. She has Kira’s sword in her hands.

Scott and Derek and a good chunk of their packs stand behind her. Between Theo and the Holloway kid, the Doctors’ only successful experiment, his ticket to true power. Or at least, he had been, when he’d been Sebastian Valet. Now it looks like he’s back to normal, cowering between Mason and Corey, muttering to himself that he’s just dreaming, that this is all nightmare.

For once, Theo empathizes.

Because a nightmare is the only place he could ever imagine his sister hurting him.

“Tara, what are you doing?” He asks, and he knows his rapid heartbeat has nothing to do with Josh’s electricity crackling in his veins. He knows it’s fear, and he knows it’s his own.

“I’m so sorry, Theo,” Tara says, her voice wavering. Watery. He can see the tears in her eyes, glittering in the light of the sword.

“Please,” he begs, even though he knows it’s pointless. Begging has never counted for anything in their family.

He knows what’s going to happen. He can read it, clear as day, across their connection.

“I love you,” she tells him, and Theo feels it.

He feels it flare to life in her chest, and across the distance between them.

He feels it even as she raises her arms above her head, and brings the sword down to pierce the earth, summoning his fate.

He feels it echo in his heart, _her_ heart. In his very soul.

Tara’s love for him is the last thing he feels as the ground beneath his feet opens up, a yawning pit that welcomes him with open arms.

As the light fades above him, at the surface of a world he doesn’t deserve.

As darkness swallows him whole, and his connection with his sister sputters out like a dying flame.


End file.
